Evolution Fitness Now: From Member to Owner in Barrington
Last Updated on 3 September, 2026
How a South Jersey sibling duo bought the gym one of them had trained at for a decade — and rebuilt the tech stack on WellnessLiving after leaving Mindbody.
A Member Who Could Not Walk Away
Jill Miscavage had been training at Evolution Fitness in Barrington, New Jersey since 2013. She knew the original owners, Brian and Danielle, for more than a decade — through workouts, COVID-era closures, and the slow rebuild that followed. When the studio came up for sale, she and her brother Chuck bought it together.
The handoff came with a complicated inheritance. A loyal but smaller post-COVID client base. A website that had not been updated since the studio moved in 2020. Almost no marketing infrastructure. And a Mindbody account Jill describes bluntly as something she “hates.” Brian still teaches bodywork, meditation, and sound healing. Jill runs everything else — on top of a full-time auditing job.
“Mindbody kept members based on reputation. They weren’t really looking to build and expand. It was just status quo. That couldn’t stay the case with us.”
Jill is an auditor by trade and detail-oriented by temperament. She made a spreadsheet to compare software platforms while her brother taught a class. That is the level of analytical attention she brought to every decision about the takeover.
A Studio Built Around Judgment
Evolution Fitness Now runs on semi-private personal training — generally three clients per trainer in a one-hour block, with overlap handled at staff discretion based on who is in the room and what they need.
“We have some clients that need a lot of hands-on help, but some are pretty self-sufficient. We can overlap them when we have people who are more self-sufficient in an hour. And if somebody’s on a new program, we don’t want all three of them on a new program at one time.”
That judgment-based approach is why appointments at Evolution Fitness are never publicly bookable. About 95% of clients run on recurring weekly slots — same day, same time. The rest text the studio directly. Only group classes are open for client self-booking.
Around the semi-private model sits a class schedule running across morning and evening blocks, occasional programming like a six-week lifting series, and an open gym component for members who want to train independently outside of coached sessions. Keyless entry makes that possible. Memberships are structured around weekly session frequency, with six-month contracts that auto-renew and billing on the first of the month.
Why Jill Left Mindbody for WellnessLiving
Jill demoed three Mindbody alternatives — Momence, PushPress, and WellnessLiving — before making the call. The complaints about her existing setup had stacked up across every tool she was running. Mindbody was slow and costly. A separate texting service, a separate phone line, a Wix website with multiple inboxes routing nowhere. No automated email, no lead capture, no win-back campaigns. A merchant statement she could not decipher. “I check six email boxes a day,” she said. “It’s very inefficient, what’s happening right now.”
WellnessLiving collapsed it into one system. Scheduling, billing, loyalty programs, two-way SMS, and a Presence-built website in a single subscription. The patchwork became one platform. Now everything is as seamless for her as it is for her clients.
The branded app mattered too. The Business Pro plan included a white-label app published under the Evolution Fitness Now name. For a studio rebuilding its identity and trying to drive retention through push notifications, having an app with the studio’s own name in the App Store was a real differentiator.
Marketing automation was the biggest gap. Mindbody offered nothing on this front. WellnessLiving’s lead capture widget, drip campaigns, win-back automations, and visual email editor mapped directly to the list Jill had been carrying in her head. “I want to be able to have it all automated. Like, hey, they didn’t buy a membership, send them this — and so on.”
Integrated payments also reduced what she had been paying Mindbody in processing fees and eliminated the paper statement charge Mindbody billed separately. ACH is on the roadmap as a lower-cost option for recurring memberships.
How WellnessLiving Fits the Operating Model
Evolution Fitness Now runs on judgment calls. Which clients can overlap, which new clients need solo attention, who gets a comp session, who is on a summer freeze and might still show up. The platform had to absorb that flexibility without forcing the studio into a generic mold.
Appointments are configured as not visible to clients. Semi-private sessions never appear in public booking. Staff retains full override authority — overlapping bookings, adjusting capacity, accommodating requests outside normal hours. Only the class schedule is exposed on the website.
Memberships handle the real-world edge cases Jill anticipated before launch: six-month auto-renewing contracts, attendance restrictions that reset on the billing cycle, session rollover with no expiration cap for older clients who miss weeks but stay committed, and a hold policy that continues billing while pausing access. “I have a lot of older clients who just can’t make it, but I don’t want to be that strict,” Jill said.
The win-back infrastructure matters specifically for this takeover. Jill inherited fifteen years of client history. Auto-updating client groups segment prospects, lapsed members, and active members in real time. Pre-built win-back automations trigger email-and-SMS sequences to anyone who has not visited in 90 days. The dormant relationships Brian and Danielle built are now inside a system designed to reach back out to them.
What Barrington Gets
Evolution Fitness Now has 200-plus Google reviews and a 4.6-star rating built on something most gyms cannot replicate: coaches who know members’ names on day one and programs adjusted every four to six weeks based on actual progress. A gym owner from the Jersey Shore tells his relocated clients that if they want a similar atmosphere in the Cherry Hill area, Evolution is their only choice.
Jill and Chuck did not buy Evolution Fitness to coast on what Brian and Danielle built. They bought it to build the next chapter — with a marketing engine, an integrated website, an app, and a single platform that handles what used to take five separate tools.
The community that survived COVID, that kept showing up based on reputation alone, is still actively rebuilding itself. That is what Barrington gains from this handoff.
Want to see more of the evolution? You can follow them on Instagram or on their Facebook!
Taking over an established fitness studio and want to modernize the tech stack without losing the community? See how WellnessLiving compares to Mindbody for semi-private training studios and group fitness operators by booking a free demo today!
